Queers, Genes, Violence, and the Liberal's Free Pass

The culture war has moved on to the next battle, with President Obama taking it upon himself to declare the Defense of Marriage Act passed by large majorities of both parties in both houses of Congress and signed by a Democratic president, to be so transparently unconstitutional that he cannot be bothered to defend it in court.

It looks like the Republican Congress is going to pick up the ball and carry on with the defense, but in the long term, the lobby for the perverse will almost certainly win this round.  Large majorities of the young see nothing wrong with homosexuality, and if you set aside any questions of fundamental morality as all modern lawyers and jurists have been taught to do, the anti-DOMA case seems pretty open and shut.

It is a fact that homosexual "marriage" is the law in several states - never mind the shady backroom deals done to make it so, or the opposition of voters.  It is clearly the case that most judges favor the liberal line on this issue regardless of underlying legal questions, having made totally opposite and contradictory resolutions in varying cases, the only common factor being that the homosexuals won.

There's no question that the Founders intended to require each state to honor and accept the legal actions of every other state via the "full faith and credit" clause.  Each state is permitted to decide who that state allows to marry, or to be granted a drivers license for that matter; but they aren't supposed reject a license, marriage or drivers, issued legally by another state.  This should also apply to gun licenses, but liberal lawyers and judges don't seem to worry about that.

No, the problem isn't recognition of other states' actions; that vitally important principle is too crystal clear to be circumvented.  The problem is the underlying basis behind homosexual "marriage" being established anywhere at all.

Equal Protection - of What?

For decades now, civil rights arguments have often revolved around the "equal protection" clause of the Constitution found in the 14th Amendment:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

On its face, homosexuality has nothing to do with equal protection.  As we've said before:

Homosexuals have exactly the same right to marry that anyone else has: they can marry one person at a time, of legal age, who is of the opposite sex and not their cousin.  Nobody has "a right to marry who they love" if it's their sibling, or if they're already married, or if she's in 5th grade.  The law applies equally to all; the "equal protection" complaint is silly.

The left asserts that homosexuality is a special case and a protected category: queers don't choose to be what they are, they're born that way just as black people and women are, and so shouldn't be discriminated against even inadvertently.

This is false logic - being black or female is about who you are, whereas homosexuality is defined by specific actions that any given individual can choose to do or not.  You can't choose not to be black; you can choose to engage in heterosexual sex, homosexual sex, both, or neither.  A tiny portion of your entire lifetime is spent doing any of the above whereas blacks are black 24/7/365.

For argument's sake, however, let's accept their view just for a moment.  The claim is that a given lifestyle choice is driven by genetic influences which nobody can control.  Since they're outside the realm of the controllable, it's unfair and unjust to penalize people who happen to be stuck with those particular genes.  Homosexuality is the result of an unlucky rolling of the genetic dice, don't blame the victim!

Fine.  So is violence.

Genetic destiny?

It's Not My Fault!

Recent research discloses a stunningly politically-incorrect genetic discovery:

Recent genetic research concerns a socially significant stereotype, that of the black male thug. The gene is called monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA. It produces an enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters which activate many of the brain’s circuits. Back in the 1990s, scientists discovered a mutation of MAOA that completely switches off the activation. The result is called Brunner syndrome, which is only known to have afflicted 14 men, all of them related. What makes this extremely rare mutation so important is that it links MAOA to violence and criminality. A man with Brunner syndrome is what psychiatrists refer to as “a bad guy.” ...

Three studies over the past five years hint that the especially dangerous 2-repeat allele might be more common among African Americans. In one study, 6% of nonwhite subjects had this allele. In another, five of 37 (14%) African-American men possessed these rare MAOA alleles.

Those percentages are remarkable given that in both studies, fewer than one percent of white men had this gene. A third study determined that 0.5% of white MAOA genes and 4.7% of African-American MAOA genes feature this 2-repeat allele—almost a tenfold difference.

It has become so painfully obvious that blacks are far more likely to commit violent crime than whites that even the New York Times admitted it.  They blame black crime on institutional white racism, of course, but the fact that most victims of black crimes are themselves black torpedoes that excuse.

The math is interesting.  By the Times' New York crime statistics, any given black is twenty times more likely to be a violent felon than any given white.  This doesn't quite mean what it sounds, though, since the overwhelming majority of crimes are committed by a few habitual criminals; most blacks, like most whites, are law-abiding citizens.

If the research on MAOA is correct, 5% of blacks have a genetic malfunction that basically predisposes them to be violent thugs, ten times as many as whites.  Allow for repeat offenses and the numbers start to make sense.

This scientific data is generally consistent with what we see: throw criminals in jail no matter what their color, and you find the prisons grossly overpopulated by violent black felons.

By liberal logic this is entirely wrong morally: many of these people are genetically predisposed to violence.  It's not their fault, as proven by science!  They should get a free pass for what they can't help!

Civilization's End?

Our liberal jurists may not be aware of this, but they are barreling towards establishing a precedent with the potential to destroy the concept of civilization itself.  Anybody who's predisposed to do something may do it without criticism!  Not letting kleptomaniacs steal denies their human rights!

This is ridiculous.  Yes, some people may be genetically more disposed to violence.  Others are genetically predisposed to alcoholism, or susceptibility to addictive substances, theft, rape, or - yes - homosexual attraction.

It does not matter: none of these genes defines you as a person and all can be overcome by personal discipline and, if necessary, societal reinforcement up to and including capital punishment.

We all know that men are more inclined to beat people up than women, but we don't allow that as an excuse in court.

It's long been obvious that evolution and natural selection impels men to spread their genes as widely as possible, but that scientific fact doesn't let philanderers or rapists off the hook either in divorce court or in the court of public opinion.  Nor should it - we all have something "wrong" in our genes, different in every case, but a hurdle nonetheless.

What this scientific research really shows is not a blanket excuse for any sort of bad behavior, quite the opposite.  It provides firm ground for asserting that the ancient writers were right all along: mankind really does suffer under a curse of "original sin" right down to our very genes.  That doesn't make the sins, or crimes, right; it merely makes us all potential sinners and criminals unless internal or external forces compel us to be otherwise, which isn't exactly news.

Homosexuals may very well genetically be born that way; fine.  It still doesn't make them married, give them the right to call themselves married, or give them a special "equal protection" claim to have their personal fetishes made immune to criticism and contempt by the force of the law.

Only a deeply sick society that believes in nothing at all could ever for a moment entertain an idea so bizarre and contrary to nature.